


Leaving Home

by rea_p



Series: Fox and Mouse [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-08
Updated: 2016-08-08
Packaged: 2018-08-07 13:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7717402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rea_p/pseuds/rea_p
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How Riofach left the Greenwood Company</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaving Home

I was fiddling with a small mechanical mouse - a prop, a tinker’s toy - after dinner one evening when Alice and Sylvia slipped into the cart we shared. Nothing like living with an moonstruck couple roughly your own age to make you feel like the proverbial third wheel on a regular basis, although to be fair they’d clear out when I bought a townie back and never tried to make me feel out of place. 

“Um, Ri,” Alice started, sitting down so her eyes were on my level (some humans can, in fact, be considerate). “Sylvia and I...” She trailed off and I couldn’t tell if she was excited, nervous, or something in between.

“What? I already went to your wedding.” They exchanged a giddy glance and my heart sank. “You’re leaving.” Sylvia gave a half nod and Alice twitched a smile.

I wasn't surprised, not really. The Company had been more change than not of late, with folk coming and going and somehow I'd become one of the longest-standing members (it helps when you're born to a thing, of course). Two more people whose company I genuinely enjoyed were leaving, and the Gods knew whether whoever took their spots in the cart would be as kind, as interesting. 

"We're going to the Monastery." My turn to nod. It made sense, they weren't traveling players born, either of them, nor actors at heart, and each of them was more than talented enough to find a place devoted to art. But then Sylvie said "Come with us."

I nearly dropped the metal mouse. "What? You're daft."

She laughed. "For the journey. You don't have to stay, just come with us. Fresh air, new roads. Change of the scenery." Which is a teasing thing to say to someone who changes scenery for a living. 

It was daft, because there was no place for such as me at the Monastery, having no single art form that I'd perfected, unlike Sylvie (a sculptor in clay when she had the chance, in fabric for our troupe) and Alice (the finest painter of backdrops or portraits I've yet to meet). 

And yet the idea caught me immediately and wouldn't let go, as though I were a mouse and it a cat that had pounced. I'd spent my entire life in the Greenwood Company, traveling the Broken Kingdoms in carts with a patchwork family, my own blood finding their way to fixedness some time ago (mother and father keeping house with old Paul, who ran the Company when I was born, and my sister away with her sweetheart, seeking wisdom on high roads). I wasn't ready to leave the roads, but a new destination, and perhaps new traveling companions after we'd reached the Monastery, sounded like a new well to one's who been drinking stale water.

I returned their smiles. "When do we leave?" I asked, and was smothered in a double hug from laughing artisans.

**Author's Note:**

> The Monastery is one of the many fantastic bits of the rich and complicated my DM has come up with - it's on the top of a mountain and is inhabited entirely by artisans (it is, in actual fact, the domain of a dragon who hoards art and artists, but no one knows that). 
> 
> Sylvie's name comes from a recent work of history - _Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America_ by Rachel Hope Cleves - which I haven't actually read (yet).


End file.
